What is "metaphorical"

Usage examples of "metaphorical".

One of the flower arrangements from lunch sits on the bedside table: white peonies, the metaphorical antonym of my psyche at this moment.

Because we live on the seam between formula and mystery, because I can recognize in the harmonic vicissitudes the hummable tune is put through some similar, metaphorical bend, music marks out the way all messages go.

Naturalists, however, use such language only in a metaphorical sense: they are far from meaning that during a long course of descent, primordial organs of any kind--vertebrae in the one case and legs in the other--have actually been modified into skulls or jaws.

The nature of such imaginative truth is manifested by the indirect, polysemous, and metaphorical nature of the genres through which it is perceived.

AI telotaxis was about as subtle as the metaphorical turd in the proverbial punchbowl, Isozaki-san.

For what are footballs if not metaphorical turkeys, flying up and down a meadow?

Unwashed feet and unaired rooms, a lot of dirty laundry both real and metaphorical.

For those who are perhaps not familiar with Pisces, it is essentially English with different grammatical and metaphorical structures.

The various sects of mystics, allied in faith and feeling to the Sufis, which are quite numerous in the East, agree in a deep metaphorical explanation of the vulgar notions pertaining to Deity, judgment, heaven, and hell.

If the Chumash Powers were still around, hanging by a metaphorical fingernail, would bringing in leprechauns rob them of the tiny measure of devotion they needed to survive?

The New York Review of Science Fiction, John Kessel observed that contemporary mainstream fiction tends to shy away from larger perspectives and generalized implications, preferring to emphasize the minute evocation of specific places, people, and small-scale events, while sf continues to embrace a more generalized perspective, inviting broad metaphorical and symbolic readings, even in stories confined to familiar milieux and recognizable contemporary settings.

At another time, notwithstanding his imperfect knowledge of the language, Sir Kenneth might have been interested in the recitation, which, though dictated by a more extravagant imagination, and expressed in more inflated and metaphorical language, bore yet a strong resemblance to the romances of chivalry then so fashionable in Europe.

A single natural phrase of peasant speech, a direct physical sense given to a word that genteel parlance authorises readily enough in its metaphorical sense, and at a touch you have blown the roof off the drawing-room of the villa, and have set its obscure inhabitants wriggling in the unaccustomed sun.

So we sit and stare at Frater Antony’s little jade skull-pendant, and we’re told to perform various metaphorical absorptions and engulfments having to do with the relation of death to life, but what they really want us to do is learn how to focus all our mental energy on a single object.

The pain sensations, which had taken advantage of Vimes's unconscious state to bunk off for a metaphorical quick cigarette, rushed back.